Friday, January 21, 2000

Election computers get 'no' vote

The local election board has cast its vote against a computer system the state is pressuring counties to use to track voter registration. And Frederick County isn't alone.

Faced with a busy election cycle ahead, four other counties have chosen to stick with their own systems, waiting until the Local Election Management System, or LEMS, is free of deficiencies.

"There are lots of problems that should have been taken care of from the beginning, lots of bugs," said Maxine Pratt, executive director of the Frederick County Board of Elections.

LEMS was meant to go live in December. Instead, election boards in Frederick, Harford, Queen Anne's, Wicomico, Baltimore and Howard counties decided to stick with their current systems, at least for the March primary.

The decision drew a testy response from the State Board of Elections. On Dec. 10, Administrator Linda Lamone wrote to the jurisdictions, expressing the state board's disappointment and calling the decision "premature and unacceptable."

On Tuesday, the Frederick County Commissioners approved a lease agreement with the county's current voter registration software vendor to supply necessary conversion programs so the county's current system can remain in place until at least January 2001.

Ms. Pratt told the commissioners that the database of voters had many errors. Her own birth date was in the year 2048, she said.

It said a person born in 1923 was 141 years too young to vote. After the data was re-entered, it said he was still 41 years too young, she said.

And the system doesn't yet print out all the information the board collects on a voter, so tracking changes and looking for errors can be difficult.

But such glitches are to be expected with a new computer system, said Timothy Augustine, deputy administrator for the State Board of Elections.

"It's not going to be all peaches and cream, but it's not going to be the end of the world either," Mr. Augustine said from his Annapolis office.

The computer system, developed by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of North Carolina, will let counties do monthly, weekly or daily checks for duplicate registrations, Mr. Augustine said.

It also could save hundreds of thousands of records from being entered manually, he said. LEMS will connect to the Motor Vehicles Administration, and access the voter registration records MVA clerks key in, he said.

"There's an awful lot of benefit of having a standardized, centralized voter registration system," Mr. Augustine said.

But in Frederick and elsewhere, the dream is a far stretch from reality.

In Howard County, staff members entered several names into the system, and then checked to see if they existed. Only the individuals' identification numbers appeared, not their names, addresses or affiliations.

"That really scared us. We were backlogged and trying to get everything in. It was really frustrating," said Evelyn Purcell, acting election director in Ellicott City.

Mr. Augustine said that problem was the result of a bug that was later fixed by ES&S.

Other county officials said they had trouble getting telephone support from ES&S. Mr. Augustine said that problem was resolved. Harford County plans to stick with its own system, operated on the county's mainframe computer, through the primaries.

"We don't have enough time to fully test it with full confidence. The timing is a big factor," election director Rita Dather said. Washington County is one of several counties that must use LEMS because they rely on the state to do voter registration data processing.

After the conversion to LEMS, the Washington County database had 10 fewer voters.

"It's not without its problems. It gets frustrating at times. It really, really does," said Dorothy Kaetzel, the Washington County election director.

Mr. Augustine blamed the problems in Hagerstown to data entry errors. Ms. Kaetzel said the county has enough hard-copy records that no voter will be turned away.

Like Mr. Augustine, Ms. Purcell expressed optimism the problems would work themselves out.

"I think everybody was nervous that it did not do everything that it was supposed to do," she said.

But Ms. Pratt isn't quite so hopeful.

"I feel if problems are expected then it should be postponed," she said.

Source: By Douglas Tallman, Frederick News-Post Staff; Frederick, Maryland

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/display.cfm?storyid=1966

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), January 21, 2000